Lebenswelt and reflexive Democracy in Habermas and Honneth
a – humanas: direito, filosofia
Nythamar de Oliveira
Ph.D. in Philosophy (State University of New York, 1994), Humboldt Fellow (Kassel
University, 2005-06)
Associate Professor, Dept of Philosophy, Pontifical Catholic University (PUCRS), Porto
Alegre, Brazil
This paper reexamines Habermas’s conception of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) in dialogue with
Rawls’s procedural device of reflective equilibrium so as to recast Honneth’s theory of
recognition in terms of a reflexive, democratic ethos. Honneth’s conception of reflexive
democracy turns out to be an alternative to substantive models of liberation and
participation (such as Arendt’s republican conception of democracy) and to procedural
models of deliberative democracy, because of their restrictive views of the public,
political arenas (Rawls and Habermas). The idea of a “reflexive democracy” is also found
in Olson and related to Giddens’s conception of “reflexive modernity.” I should like to
propose a pragmatic perspectivism as a reconstructive, social phenomenology of the
Lebenswelt by resorting to Habermas’s tripartite, intersubjective aspects of the lifeworld
oriented toward socially, linguistically shared understanding of everyday practices
(verständigungsorientiert handelnden Aspekte: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Persönlichkeit) and
to Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium, understood in hermeneutic terms, so as to
deal with the moral, legal, and political contexts of signification, the problem of a
normative conception of the person, and the challenge of perspectivism inherent in
reasonable pluralism. A grammar of fairness must thus go beyond the procedural, fair
distribution of material goods, and must be correlated to the fundamental principle of
recognition (doing justice to the other) and its implicit moral grammar of social conflicts,
as Honneth has brilliantly argued, in order to avoid equating cultural relativism with
moral relativism and the postmodernist dissolution of the aesthetic and normative
substance of the social lifeworld. I assume that the Lebenswelt stands overall for the
horizon of socially, culturally sedimented linguistic meanings that make up the
background environment of competences, practices, and attitudes shared by social actors.
The problematic relationship between systems and lifeworld lies, therefore, at the bottom
of the normative grounds of social criticism, just as the basic ideas of cooperation and
competition have determined social philosophical approaches to political theory.
Following Habermas and Honneth's criticisms of systemic, instrumentalized power, I
propose to recast reflexive self-formations in a democratic political culture through
intersubjective recognition and redistributive justice, so that they cannot ultimately be
separated from their correlated lifeworldly techniques of self-esteem, self-care, and selfunderstanding. Honneth's theory of recognition successfully revisits the critique of power
so as to address what I have dubbed "the phenomenological deficit of critical theory" (das
phänomenologische Defizit der Kritischen Theorie), inherent in the Frankfurt School's
attempt at a dialectic of enlightenment that breaks away from the demonization of the
technological, instrumental domination of nature. The ongoing democratization of
emerging societies and developing countries is a complex process that has engaged
diverse segments of civil society and still has a long way to go, as a reflexive model of
radical democracy is to be accomplished not only by social movements from below, let
alone by governors, the elites or intellectuals, as it were, from above, but ultimately by
civil society as a whole and its deliberative, reflective commitments to solidarity and
networks of social cooperation. What is at stake, after all, is the institutionalization of the
social world, beyond traditional accounts of society and state. Honneth has convincingly
shown, however, the impossibility of maintaining communicative reason immune from
the instrumentalization of social action in the very attempt to tackle the paradox of the
rationalization of lifeworldly relations, as anticipated by Habermas's own account of
socialization. Honneth seeks thus to rescue the lifeworldly, civil society’s locus of the
democratic ethos, which tends to be eclipsed by Rawls’s idea of public reason and
Habermas’s public sphere.
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